March 2006 Archives

This evening, Susan and I stopped by Casey's to pick up some fuel for studying. On a whim, I had the brillient idea of buying a lottery ticket. My theory, of course, is that people who buy lottery tickets on a whim are more likely to win than those who buy them on a regular basis. Despite it being against all the statistical common sense in my being, I did it anyway. Someone's got to win, right? 1:10,179,260 isn't too bad when you really think about it.

Then, much to my dismay, I matched not a single number. Maybe I shouldn't have picked all 2s.

In other news, I'm in the hard-core phase of studying for comps, which for those who don't know, is the required comprehensive examination for doctoral students. No pass, no degree. No pressure, right? I think I'll be okay, though. Really, I do. All I need to know is everything, and as long as I have that down pat, I've got no reason in the world to worry.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: moose should not be allowed to drive cars. As soon as they start talking on their darn cell phones - bam, there goes their attention to the road.

Well, it looks like somone finally managed the inevitable: getting Windows XP to install on an Intel iMac. I'm really interested to see what happens with this. Will it sell more Macs...or will Apple freak out and try to roadblock it?

You can read a little bit about it here: http://www.appleinsider.com/article.php?id=1597. Here's the web site that offered the $14,000 prize for the first person to do it: http://www.winxponmac.com. Congrats to Mr. Narf2006!

I was checking out the statistics for my web site this morning, and I saw that two people came across me after searching for "skin rashes" in a search engine. What the heck? Most of the other searches were relatively boring, although apparently I'm pretty popular for folks looking for Calvin and Hobbes comics and Jonathon Brandmeier's Dink album. That album is so obscure, I can't even find a link to it in Google.

This is why I want to add more substance to this place.

Who wants to join me in a grass-roots effort to bring back the Arch Deluxe at McDonald's? I really miss that burger.

Quick download

If you are a part of the relatively small subgroup of people who use Mac OS X and Cisco's VPN client, you may have come across an error message that prevents you from starting the program after putting your computer to sleep or losing your internet connection. It would say something like this:

Error 51: Unable to communicate with the VPN subsystem

I took the liberty of putting the ideas found here into a simple application. Feel free to download the image file, which includes the application, instructions, and an optional Applescript file. Hopefully a few people will be able to make use of it.

[Update: This workaround may not be necessary for version 4.9 of the VPN client. If you find this to not be the case with you, please let me know!]

All right. So I suppose that I should take some time to explain what has happened to my web site. And I have a little bit of time as I wait for my dog to calm down after being outside in the cold for his nightly walk. So here's what's going on: I discovered the concept of "Movable Type," which is blogging software that everybody and their mother uses on this here "Inter-net." So along with using it for what you see here, I applied one of the nicer visual themes (with a few tweaks) to the bulk of my site. I'll convert everything, eventually. Basically, the software is a lot easier to work with than the old stuff I used, it's quite a bit prettier, and I enjoy jumping on bandwagons. So here I am!

I'm trying to figure out a theme for this blog, however, as most people probably don't care to read about the daily (or approximately bi-yearly, in my case) events in the life of a newlywed graduate student. I might like to use it as an academic sounding board, as something to stimulate my mind a little bit while maybe sharing the experience with the few people who stumble upon this site. But who knows if I will actually stick to it on a consistent basis. I think that I need some sort of reinforcement. When you receive 10 comments in almost 3.5 years of blogging, the motivation has a tendency to dwindle. But let's just see what happens.